Douglas Crockford

Douglas Crockford was born in Frostbite Falls, Minnesota, but left when he was only six months old because it was just too damn cold. He turned his back on a promising career in television when he discovered computers. He has worked in learning systems, small business systems, office automation, games, interactive music, multimedia, location-based entertainment, social systems, and programming languages. He is the inventor of Tilton, the ugliest programming language that was not specifically designed to be an ugly programming language. He is best known for having discovered that there are good parts in JavaScript. This was an important and unexpected discovery. He also discovered JSON, the world's most loved data interchange format. He is currently working on making the web a secure and reliable software delivery platform. He has his work cut out for him.

Presentations

Numbers (2017)

Computers are machines that manipulate numbers. That is literally all that they can do, and yet they are now facilitating and mediating virtually all human activity. This is the story of numbers: where they came from, how they work, and where they may be going. Every programmer should know this story.

The better parts (2017)

This talk is about using programming languages more effectively, and using that experience to create and select better programming languages. There are bad practices in software development that are so old and well established that it is difficult to recognize the problems they cause. There will be a review of the new good parts in ES6. JSON will also be mentioned.